


on inhabiting an orange (all our roads go nowhere)

by Penknife



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Being bathed while mutually pining, F/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-23 12:44:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20892326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penknife/pseuds/Penknife
Summary: She isn't trying to get closer (that isn't true at all).





	on inhabiting an orange (all our roads go nowhere)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [foxjar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxjar/gifts).

The hot spring in the snow is the one mercy of an excursion to Emprise du Lion that has been going very, very badly. Ellana is covered in blood, mostly not her own, and she can feel the slivers of red lyrium in her hair and under her fingernails, red lyrium dust singing in the dried blood on her hands.

She strips out of her clothes, refusing to pretend to a city-dweller’s self-consciousness. Solas seems to scorn city elves’ manners and Dalish ways equally, but if he objects to her naked body, he can go join Varric and Blackwall, who have thrown themselves down by the fire back in camp to sleep like the dead.

She’s swam naked since she was a child. It’s maddening to wonder if his eyes are on her, to wonder if he’s disapproving or watching her with concealed hungry interest. It’s perverse to care, while she’s shaky with exhaustion and polluted with cursed lyrium and filth and blood.

She ducks under the steaming water, shaking out her hair, and surfaces, and can’t resist a look at Solas. He’s huddled by the edge of the pool, close enough to feel its warmth, his eyes not on her but somewhere far away. He’s bruised and bleeding and as uninterested as ever in allowing anyone to tend him. He’ll bandage his own wounds and sleep composed and cold and alone.

“You, too,” she says, surprising herself by breaking the silence.

His head goes up as if surprised to be addressed. “What?”

“You’re filthy. Strip off and get clean.”

She expects a protest, but instead he strips as if she’s dared him to, which perhaps she has. He climbs down into the pool ungracefully, wincing and then closing his eyes as the heat sinks in.

“You’re bleeding,” she points out. The red spreading in the water isn’t all lyrium.

He looks down and raises his arm to inspect the long scrape down it. “It isn’t deep.”

“I’ll heal it.”

“If you insist, when you’ve rested,” he says, but it’s a refusal, a very polite refusal.

She declines to accept his refusal, gathering the power and sending it rushing over him in a spill of golden light. The cut on his arm knits, and her world grays and spins.

She’s aware a moment later of his arm against her back, steadying her. “That was foolish.”

“Would you have let me bandage it?”

“If you insisted.” There’s a surprised amusement in his tone, and she’s not sure he’s really sorry to be tended. She wants to believe he isn’t really sorry.

“Good to know,” she says, and lets herself lean back against his arm just a little bit, because she knows she’s being foolish, and she might as well not stop. “Help me get clean.”

She expects him to refuse that, and instead after a moment’s hesitation his hands slide down her shoulders, scrubbing away blood and crystalline grit.

It’s probably an innocent touch, his hands moving down her rib cage, grazing down her hips under the warm water. It’s probably entirely the service a friend does another friend. She lets herself lean into the pressure of his strong hands, his callused fingers. She fights the urge to arch her hips.

Back up her back, and his hands are combing through her hair, raking it clean. They’re warm and wet on her shoulders.

She takes his hands and draws them forward to where there’s blood dried under her chin. He wipes it away with his thumb, and then his hands are warm on her throat. He doesn’t hesitate, sweeping his thumbs across the line of her collarbone, his hands moving lower, his palms brushing her breasts, a steady dispassionate touch.

Except that his breathing is quickening. He cups her breast with one hand while the other explores the warm hollow of her hip. She leans her head back against his naked shoulder, taking a shuddering breath. Just a friend doing a service for a friend.

And then he draws away, although the steaming water does nothing to hide his arousal, and when she turns she can see the hunger in his face, and watch him putting it carefully away, along with pain and weariness and everything else that he won’t share with anyone. So self-contained. So careful.

“There’s blood on your face,” she lies, and runs her fingers down his cheek to see him shudder.


End file.
